Post by melody7song on Apr 26, 2016 21:48:51 GMT
Reading through these articles about decisions and judgment under risky situations, I immediately thought about the Stanford Prison Experiment.
web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/uarch/exhibits/spe/Narration.pdf
We've all heard about this experiment. Phillip Zimbardo studied the psychological effects of role-playing prison guards and prisoners on college students, and the experiment went much farther than he expected and spun out of control - even to the point where he as the superintendent allowed psychological and authoritarian abuse to continue far longer than it was ethical.
I think it's interesting how these students adapted to their roles and under this high-intensive, realistic situation, decided to make their various risky choices. The guards decided to be abusive and authoritarian, and the prisoners mostly subjected themselves passively to the abuse. These are smart, intelligent students--the best of the country. Yet, when faced with a moral and ethical decision, all decided to passively submit to what their roles demanded of them.
I am also currently taking Political Science 30, which focuses on Politics and Strategy, and I find that it overlaps with a lot of what these articles discuss. We essentially break down game theory and address payoffs to different decisions in a game tree to compare different strategies that players might take. We compare probabilities and see how nature and odds take over at times to change player's decisions and how they proceed with what they believe will give them the highest possible payoff. We viewed decisions and choices as very objective and decided that the player would always choose the node with the higher payoff. However, looking at the heuristics and other factors that should be considered, I'm finding that perhaps the game tree is too simple of a model to fit real-life decisions.
My question is: how applicable to real life are game trees? and how do we depict such situations such as the Stanford Prison Experiment? Is that a probability that the students would or would not subject to their prison guard and prisoner roles?
web.stanford.edu/dept/spec_coll/uarch/exhibits/spe/Narration.pdf
We've all heard about this experiment. Phillip Zimbardo studied the psychological effects of role-playing prison guards and prisoners on college students, and the experiment went much farther than he expected and spun out of control - even to the point where he as the superintendent allowed psychological and authoritarian abuse to continue far longer than it was ethical.
I think it's interesting how these students adapted to their roles and under this high-intensive, realistic situation, decided to make their various risky choices. The guards decided to be abusive and authoritarian, and the prisoners mostly subjected themselves passively to the abuse. These are smart, intelligent students--the best of the country. Yet, when faced with a moral and ethical decision, all decided to passively submit to what their roles demanded of them.
I am also currently taking Political Science 30, which focuses on Politics and Strategy, and I find that it overlaps with a lot of what these articles discuss. We essentially break down game theory and address payoffs to different decisions in a game tree to compare different strategies that players might take. We compare probabilities and see how nature and odds take over at times to change player's decisions and how they proceed with what they believe will give them the highest possible payoff. We viewed decisions and choices as very objective and decided that the player would always choose the node with the higher payoff. However, looking at the heuristics and other factors that should be considered, I'm finding that perhaps the game tree is too simple of a model to fit real-life decisions.
My question is: how applicable to real life are game trees? and how do we depict such situations such as the Stanford Prison Experiment? Is that a probability that the students would or would not subject to their prison guard and prisoner roles?